The recent publication of a new edition of Love
and Freindship, with a portrait on the
cover of someone who was not
Jane Austen, sent shock waves through the ranks of Austen lovers
everywhere. Our President, J. David Grey, established the identity
of the “wrong” picture, which turned out to be that of
Sarah Austin, a nineteenth-century translator and writer on
education, – a lady well-known in her day, but not the author
of the book in question.

Portraits of the real Jane Austen are few. One of
the most familiar is the engraving reproduced on the JASNA
letterhead, which shows her looking a little to her right, wearing a
ruffled cap, with a small frill drawn up around her neck by a narrow
ribbon. However, many people do not realize that this particular
portrait is not a picture of Jane Austen made during her lifetime,
but an imaginary reconstruction. It was engraved from a drawing made
by a Mr. Andrews of Maidenhead, to be used as a frontispiece for the
publication in 1870 of the Memoir of
Jane Austen by her nephew, James Edward
Austen-Leigh. When the Rev. Mr. Austen-Leigh was preparing his work
for the press he submitted Mr. Andrews’ drawing to Jane’s
nieces, who had known her as children, and we have Dr. R. W.
Chapman’s authority that they gave it only “very guarded
and qualified approval: it was not positively inconsistent with their
youthful recollections; perhaps it gave some idea of the truth.”
One would like to know what James Edward’s own opinion was –
he was eighteen when his aunt died, and had known her well.

Mr.
Andrews based his picture on the only surviving authentic record of
Jane Austen’s features drawn from life. This is the pencil
sketch, with the face and hair in watercolors, made by her sister
Cassandra. It is now one of the proudest possessions of the National
Portrait Gallery in London, whose experts have tentatively dated it
about 1810. This little sketch is both slight and amateurish, yet it
breathes life, – Jane herself sat for it, and Cassandra’s
hands made the drawing and applied the faint color.

These three versions – Cassandra’s c. 1810 sketch, the
Andrews drawing, and the 1870 engraving – have all been used
many times as illustrations in books and magazines.

The only other actual picture we have that may be of Jane Austen is
another tinted drawing by Cassandra, signed and dated “C.E.A.
1804” It represents in profile a lady sitting down outdoor’s,
but unfortunately the lady’s sunbonnet almost completely
conceals her face, so that if she is Miss Austen the picture doesn’t
help us to know what she looked like. In identifying this as Jane
Austen, Dr. Chapman relies on the evidence of a letter of 1862 from
Jane’s niece Anna Lefroy to James Edward Austen-Leigh,
referring to “a sketch which Aunt Cassandra made of her in one
of their expeditions – sitting down out of doors on a hot day,
with her bonnet strings untied.” Perhaps it is Jane, –
but one could wish that she had taken her bonnet off!

Another candidate is a “portrait of Jane
Austen the novelist by Zoffany,” reproduced in Lord Brabourne’s
edition of the Letters
in 1884, and again in a biography published in 1913. This shows a
very young girl, hardly more than a child, wearing a dress which
costume historians have dated at 1805 or later; it is widely thought
that it cannot be Jane Austen on the grounds that as she turned
thirty in 1805, the date of the dress and the age of the sitter make
this impossible.

A booklet on sale in the shop at Winchester Cathedral carries on its
cover a silhouette said to be of Jane Austen. The original, which
has inscribed on the back that it was “done by herself in
1815,” was given to the Dean and Chapter of Winchester in 1936
by Miss Jessie Lefroy. (On the right above)

There is only one more possibility. In 1944 a
bookseller found volumes 1 and 2 of the second edition (1816) of
Mansfield Park.
In one of these volumes is pasted a silhouette of a woman’s
head, with the inscription “L’aimable Jane.” There
is a presumption that this silhouette may be of Jane Austen, although
the National Portrait Gallery, whose properly it is, lists it with
the notation “identity uncertain.” Its detractors claim
that the hair style is of the wrong period for this to be authentic.
(Left, above)

We
lost much by Jane Austen’s early death, – half-a-dozen
more novels perhaps (and who can say in what direction her genius
might have developed); a great many more letters, possibly without
Cassandra’s censorship. But if Jane had lived as long as her
sister, say to 1845, might we not also have had a photograph?
Imagine her in such a picture, an old lady in the sloping-shouldered
fashion of the ’forties, with a lace cap and collar, wearing
the rather severe expression which the long photographic exposures of
those days imposed on sitters. Perhaps the younger members of her
family might have urged her to submit to having her likeness taken by
the new-fangled process. How precious to us, nearly 150 years later,
would such a likeness have been – and how much closer to us it
would have seemed to bring her.